I call bullshit

More anonymous sources from the Pentagon leaking a report that remains undisclosed with information about prisoners that may or may not be accurate. Fantastic. I expect to see it all over the news tomorrow. I’m sure this will be touted by useless schmucks over and over about how this proves the necessity of the prison.

How many people held for a crime in America are released without charge? I’m sure the statistic exists, but no one bothers because it would be so high as to seem trivial. I’m sure that 1 in 7 have committed a crime since then; this does not make it OK to hold prisoners indefinitely without charge. Recidivism rates in the United States are absurdly high (anywhere from 50-70% depending on the state and crime); this does not make it OK to hold all prisoners for life in prison. It’s the old Blackstone ratio: “better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.”

Let’s flip this around! Do you realize that 6 in 7 of the released Guantanamo prisoners has not returned to terrorism? After being held without charge, tortured and interrogated, then released into a country that they usually knew little to nothing about (Welcome to Germany/France/wherever will take you, Uighurs!), they STILL did not become terrorists. That’s outrageous! Who wouldn’t hate the country that wrongfully imprisoned and tortured them?

Captives at Guantánamo Bay were chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor for 18 hours or more, urinating and defecating on themselves, an FBI report has revealed.

[…]

Besides being shackled to the floor, detainees were subjected to extremes of temperature. One witness said he saw a barefoot detainee shaking with cold because the air conditioning had bought the temperature close to freezing.

On another occasion, the air conditioning was off in an unventilated room, making the temperature over 38C (100F) and a detainee lay almost unconscious on the floor with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been pulling out his hair throughout the night.

Read that and tell me you wouldn’t hate the country that did that to you. And yet, only 1 in 7 has apparently joined a terrorist cause. If anything, that’s remarkable. We must have really screwed up when we called these guys “the worst of the worst.”

None of this changes the basic problem: It is morally wrongto keep Guantanamo open. It may be expeditious to keep it there; it may be convenient; it may make us feel safer. But, rest assured, holding people indefinitely with no charge and no hope of justice is the opposite of both the American and human ideal. All the fear-mongering in the world only prolongs our moral failure.

UPDATE: The story is Column One! Unsubstantiated reports from the Pentagon at exactly the moment that fear-mongering is hitting its high point? Sounds like news to me!